Additional Resources

In Shake It Up, Jonathan Lethem (The Fortress of Solitude) and Kevin Dettmar (Is Rock Dead?) offer a hit parade of the most outspoken and distinctly personal voices from a half century of writing about rock and pop music.

In 1968, the New Yorker hired Ellen Willis as its first popular music critic. Her column, Rock, Etc., ran for seven years and established Willis as a leader in cultural commentary and a pioneer in the nascent and otherwise male-dominated field of rock criticism.

Focusing on a handful of performers - Harmonica Frank, Robert Johnson, the Band, Sly Stone, Randy Newman, and Elvis Presley - Greil Marcus opens up the American story of ambition and defeat, dreams and lies.

From Nelson George, supervising producer and writer of the hit Netflix series, "The Get Down, Hip Hop America is the definitive account of the society-altering collision between black youth culture and the mass media.

InLove for Sale, David Hajdu--one of the most respected critics and music historians of our time--draws on a lifetime of listening, playing, and writing about music to show how pop has done much more than peddle fantasies of love and sex to teenagers.

The first and only biography of Jann Wenner, the iconic founder of Rolling Stone magazine, and a romp through the hothouses of rock and roll, politics, media, and Hollywood, from the Summer of Love to the Internet age. Lennon. Dylan. Jagger. Belushi. Leibovitz.

The World That Made New Orleans offers a new perspective on this insufficiently understood city by telling the remarkable story of New Orleans’s first century--a tale of imperial war, religious conflict, the search for treasure, the spread of slavery, the Cuban connection, the cruel aristocracy of sugar, and the very different revolutions that created the United States and Haiti. It demonstrates that New Orleans already had its own distinct personality at the time of Louisiana’s statehood in 1812. By then, important roots of American music were firmly planted in its urban swamp--especially in the dances at Congo Square, where enslaved Africans and African Americans appeared en masse on Sundays to, as an 1819 visitor to the city put it, "rock the city.”